Local communities and planning authorities will see far smaller long-term payroll gains than the tech sector asserts, Verdant finds. The thinktank estimates planned UK datacentres would directly employ about 10,400 people, roughly a quarter of the 40,000 jobs TechUK projects. Verdant reached this figure from a sample of 20 schemes where staffing numbers appear in planning applications, company accounts and press releases, and from international comparisons.
The thinktank says datacentres already built in Britain have generated fewer than 4,400 permanent jobs, which Verdant measures as about 8.6 jobs per megawatt of capacity. That stands in contrast to TechUK’s projection of 43.7 jobs per megawatt. Verdant also warns that newer proposals, which are generally on a larger scale, are likely to be even less job intensive, and could create as few as 1.6 permanent roles per megawatt.
Verdant’s tally counts the ongoing operational workforce required to run facilities and excludes the many temporary construction jobs tied to building them. James Meadway, co-director of Verdant, said, “We’re being rushed into supporting a frantic pace of datacentre buildout on very flimsy economic grounds. Clearly artificial intelligence and related technologies have great potential. But vast new datacentres arrive at significant real costs to local communities and even our climate ambitions, and their use case has to be made by the government and industry, rather than assuming we can build first and then work out why we did later.”
The government disputed Verdant’s method and the relevance of a jobs-per-megawatt metric, arguing the analysis understates the wider economic value of compute and the national security case for hosting critical digital infrastructure in Britain. Labour has signalled political support for a fast rollout by treating AI datacentres as critical national infrastructure. Kanishka Narayan argued a sovereign computing capability is necessary, saying, “The British public is very clear that it wants strong defence. It wants strong, sovereign capability, it doesn’t just want foreign billionaires to own things that matter to our lives. If we’re being true to those British values, it is impossible to achieve that without building a sovereign level of datacentre capacity in this country.”
By contrast, the Green party has called for a moratorium and organised protests, warning that prioritising datacentres risks steamrolling local opposition and could strain water supplies during droughts. TechUK defended its employment numbers, saying, “Our estimates that the UK datacentre industry supports 43,500 jobs, and could support 40,000 more by 2035, are built on a published methodology using industry data and standard economic impact assessment techniques. The figures were built transparently from the best available industry data at the time, and we are confident they remain a reasonable estimate of the sector’s employment contribution.”
The dispute leaves planners and communities weighing competing claims about jobs, national security and environmental cost as the government faces pressure to decide whether to accelerate approvals. Local authorities must now judge whether promised employment gains justify resource allocations and landscape changes, or whether the bulk of economic benefit will flow elsewhere.
